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The Case of Myart Versus Motorola in the State of Illinois

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Testing has remained relatively unaffected by state or Federal legislation throughout the years. Certainly, laws such as the Wagner Act of 1935 affected the social climate in such a way that testing was more easily adopted by employers as a selection instrument.

However, no direct legislation dealing with testing has appeared on either the state or national levels Psychologists have attempted to maintain this state of affairs by an active system of self-regulation through a code of ethics and by administering professional sanctions to ethics violators. In keeping their own house clean, they hope to avoid the need for outside regulation such as is found in medicine and law.

The recent social dynamism in America referred to as the civil rights movement has brought industrial testing into a rather precarious position—one which has caused a great deal of concern to the profession of psychology. At the crux of the matter is the extremely complex question of whether psychological tests can be, and in fact are, discriminatory in nature.

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Since the Federal Civil Rights Act (Title VII) and many similar state civil rights acts, laws have clauses which evaluate the hiring, firing, or promotion of employees in terms of whether or not there was any “discriminatory intent” involved. It may eventually become necessary to dem­onstrate to the satisfaction of the courts that all tests used for such purposes are indeed non-discriminatory.

Myart versus Motorola:

One such instance involving industrial testing has already occurred, the case of Myart versus Motorola (1964) in the State of Illinois. In this instance Myart brought suit against the Motorola Corporation through the Illinois Fair Employ­ment Practices Commission (FEPC), claiming that he had been discriminated against because of race during the hiring process.

The case was originally heard by a FEPC examiner who ruled that Motorola should (1) cease using their low-level screening test because it did not equate for inequalities and environmental factors of culturally deprived groups and (2) hire Myart. This examiner’s decision was based upon his evaluation of testimony concerning the extent to which the screening test was discriminatory in nature.

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When the case was reviewed by the full commission, the ruling was changed somewhat. The FEPC did not feel the problem of test discrimination was at ques­tion. Rather, the commission was more concerned with whether Myart’s test score had been changed by the company so that he would fall below cut-off. (Myart’s original complaint did not allege the test to be discriminatory.) However, the Commission stated it “did not ignore the possibility that tests of this nature are inherently discriminatory against persons alien to the predominant middle class white culture.” The Commission’s final decision was to (1) award Myart damages and (2) not require that he be hired by Motorola.

The immediate and the eventual impact of discrimination in testing is hard to determine. Certainly it is a complex problem. There is no question that many of our tests do favour those raised in a white middle-class culture. The normative data for these people tends to be higher than for other groups.

There is always the ques­tion of cause and effect. Do white middle-class people score higher because they indeed have more of what is being measured than do the other cultural groups, or do they score better because the test “favours” them? This is a very difficult question to answer. Psychologists have made numerous attempts to develop truly “culture free” tests in such areas as intelligence and have achieved only a modicum of success.

If carried to extremes, the discrimination problem can become ludicrous. 1 here are many tests which show clear-cut sex differences. Suppose a circus were to use a job-sample test requiring the lifting of heavy weights in selecting its strongman. Such a test would clearly discriminate against women, yet the right of the circus owner to establish a minimum ‘cut-off value would not be questioned.

One might ask what would occur if a woman were found who could lift much more than a normal woman, even though not as much as a very strong man. Should the circus hire her and change the act to “the world’s strongest woman? This, of course, is one way of handling the discrimination problem and involves using different norms, standards, and cut-offs for each group. Sex becomes a moderator variable in that a separate validity coefficient would be computed to reach subgroup. A hypothetical scatter-plot of the situation might look like Figure 4.3.

There is a difficulty in using separate norms (or equation groups by a transforma­tion such as the Z score) to remove group differences. In most hiring situations it is now illegal to obtain information on race during the employment process. Thus, any application blank or test booklet may not indicate the applicant’s race. It is therefore impossible at any later time to develop different norms for the separate groups in order to equate for cultural factors. Suffice it to say that this is an area in industrial psychology which will be interesting to keep tabs on in the next few years.